Truman(6)

Truman stayed on the farm until 1917, from the age of 22 to 33. This was the most static period of his life, not only geographically but in other ways too. Quite simply, not very much happened to him, at least until 1916: the farm was hard work. He continued to read, although, to judge from his letters, more novel serials in monthly magazines than political biography or military history. He retained his connection with the National Guard artillery unit, but did not go to summer camps. He was too busy with the harvests. He had some, mainly cousinly, social life. He became an active Mason. And he courted Miss Bess Wallace.

This was one of the slowest courtships in history. It lasted in some form or other for 29 years, and was then followed by 53 years of marriage. It was also one of the most time-consuming. From 1910, when it entered its long home straight, to 1914, when he rather adventurously acquired a Stafford motor car, it involved him in the most appalling Saturday and Sunday journeys. Independence, although little more than 20 miles from Grandview, could not be reached across country. It involved a railroad journey to one of two junctions—Sheffield or the surprisingly named Air Line—in the north of Kansas City and then an eight-mile street-car stage to Independence. Still worse was the late night return. Any idea that the pre-1914 years were the golden age of American railroads is difficult to reconcile with Truman’s experience. The trains started late and arrived later. They were diverted by frequent derailments and frozen in winter by heating breakdowns. Truman often arrived back at Grandview at two in the morning and sometimes at seven.

Miss Bess Wallace, on one side, came of the highest quality of Independence. Her grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, made a good deal of money out of milling and marketing ‘Queen of the Pantry’ flour, which had many years of brand name success throughout the Middle West. His daughter, Madge Gates Wallace, as she was later to be known, played only too large a part in the life of Harry Truman. She married a David W. Wallace, who had some of the qualities of Eleanor Roosevelt’s father. He was handsome, charming, and drank. He shot himself in his bath in 1903. But Independence was not New York City, and David Wallace, unlike Elliott Roosevelt, was not quite the social equal of his wife. (No husband appeared to be in those democratic, open-frontier Missouri days.) And Bess Wallace was certainly no Eleanor Roosevelt. In the first place, so far from being a shy, ‘ugly duckling’ of a child, she was the belle of her Sunday School class, where Truman first met her at the age of six, and of nearly every other class as well. Her ‘golden curls’ were what first struck Truman. Later she developed a considerable athleticism and became a locally outstanding tennis player, and was talented at most other games.

She floated in and out of Truman’s life from the age of six to twenty-six. By the time they were about thirty (she was a year younger than he was) they were unofficially engaged. When he was 33 and she 32 they made it official. Two years later (World War I had intervened) they were actually married. The fact that this Independence belle married ‘below her’ to such a slow suitor was a sign of her outstanding good sense. Apart altogether from the chances of 1944-5, which led to Truman’s propulsion to world fame, he must have been the strongest character of his generation in Jackson County. But she, in a quiet way, was still stronger than he: I think he was always more concerned about her good opinion than vice versa. He was also to prove about the most devoted husband in American presidential history. Not only did he ‘not look at another woman’: he was deeply embarrassed if they looked at him, which they mostly did not.

The question which remains is why others did not press harder to carry off earlier this prize bride. One reason may be that, after 1903, they realized they would have to take her mother with her, and that only Harry Truman had the uncomplaining devotion to accept this. The extent to which he did so turned out to be almost as unparalleled as was the length of his courtship. Mrs Wallace survived nearly 34 years after the marriage and she lived every single one of them as part of the Truman household. Not only was this so in Independence. It was also so in Washington. She removed herself faithfully with the family. At the time of Truman’s accession to the presidency, Margaret Truman was sharing a bedroom with her in a small Connecticut Avenue apartment. She died in the White House a month after Eisenhower’s election. It was no political loyalty which kept her so close: she was constantly critical of her son-in-law, thought it wrong of him to sack such a fine military gentleman as General MacArthur, and would have been a natural Dewey voter in 1948. Harry Truman, for her, always remained one of nature’s ‘dirt farmers’. Perhaps one of the reasons for his joyful return to Independence in January 1953, with the presidency behind him, was that he was at last entering his own house.